to me, "calypso" is the portrait of a woman, mythical and therefore powerful, struggling and deeply accepting her humanity, or her human side, through love. by letting odysseus go, she outgrows the boundaries of the island within her and wins the immensity of the sea and its freedom. wherever he might be she is with him in heart, always. her solitude ahead is liberating.

calypso's sort of hologram, in this respect, is the queen in "the queen and the soldier". a figure of authority as well, the queen lives power as a burden and a dilemma. freedom and love, presented through the soldier, are like a mirage she can't even afford for too long, because duty and fear are so heavy. and so "she closed herself up like a fan". she is the one who becomes an island, "strangling in the solitude she preferred", in yet another portrait of someone's struggle with her humanity.

---

chance is the only thing that doesn't happen by chance

here's a live version from a show in cologne in 2002 that has been haunting me the past days:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/iuzb42

and some thoughts i sent to a friend regarding this particular recording:

"...i have been to enough of suzanne's shows to say that she is someone who likes to be in control of the performance and the ways a song will take. it seems to me in this track that she isn't. there are some parts of the melody that just seem to be out of reach for her voice. she played this song with a capo, so she could easily have tuned it down, but she didn't.

the result is that there are moments in the song where her voice suddenly turns from being firm and in control to being fragile, thin and literally out of tune. as you might know, suzanne's asthmatic, therefore her vocal range is limited and she cannot really sing long notes - and it seems as if she's composing along this line of limitation.

in this particular performance of this song she, too, is exploring this line, pushing her voice into regions where it is without control and is way past what one would consider "beautiful singing" or a "good voice" - but there is a grain in her voice, an intensity grounded in this very  frailty and insecurity (that these equal the frailty and insecurity of the character in the song just as an aside).

all this turns the performance into a very intimate one. she sang this as a second encore, as if she first had to be sure that the audience is 'familiar' and sympathetic enough for her to make herself vulnerable and voice this weakness and weaken the voice."

remember me,

philipp